An in­no­cent civil­ian, An­thony Hughes, was also shot dead and his brother wounded when they were caught up in the gun­fire. The mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion in­flicted the IRA’s largest loss of life dur­ing the Trou­bles.

Rel­a­tives of those killed claim sol­diers op­er­ated a de­lib­er­ate shoot-to-kill pol­icy rather than at­tempt to make ar­rests.

De­clan Arthurs’ fa­ther Patrick ini­tially sued just the Min­istry of De­fence over the am­bush. But with the RUC’s Mo­bile Sup­port Unit also be­lieved to have played a role in the op­er­a­tion, the PSNI was joined to the ac­tion as the force’s suc­ces­sor.

Non-sen­si­tive doc­u­ments have al­ready been handed over in the le­gal ac­tion.

The scale of the process was re­vealed pre­vi­ously when the High Court heard po­lice faced trawl­ing through elec­tronic, mi­cro­fiche and hard copy ma­te­rial in stores hold­ing more than 9.5 mil­lion in­tel­li­gence records.

The court was told dis­cov­ery is a highly com­plex task, with po­ten­tially thou­sands of redac­tions to be made un­der Public In­ter­est Im­mu­nity con­sid­er­a­tions.

But solic­i­tor Claire McKee­gan, of KRW Law, con­firmed Mr Jus­tice Maguire has now made an ‘un­less or­der’, giv­ing the PSNI 10 weeks to com­plete the PII process and hand over the re­main­ing doc­u­ments.

Fol­low­ing the hear­ing she said: “If the po­lice do not com­ply then the al­le­ga­tions that we plead in our state­ment of com­plaint will be held at their height and they will be un­able to de­fend this ac­tion. We see this as a huge step for­ward in the pro­ceed­ings.”

The bul­let rid­dled van af­ter the am­bush which killed eight IRA men